How does the sudden death of a sibling change the way we perceive our lives and our understanding of everything around us? In her memoir, Mourning Air, Leena Magdi shares her personal experience of grief and its lasting impact on her soul.
"The loss of my younger brother is a tragedy that uprooted systems of imbedded beliefs about how the world operates."
Leena Magdi is a Sudanese immigrant who has lived in the United States since she was five years old. She has two sisters and a younger brother named Hamoodi, to whom she was very close. Yet, his sudden death in Sudan during a protest in August 2022 changed her life forever.
Faced with such a profound loss, Leena finds that expressing grief in any form, whether through painting or writing, helps ease the sadness. So she chose to write her memoir as a letter to the world, sharing her personal experience.
"My hope for this book is that it will paint a picture of a mind in grief."
Sudden loss and permanent grief
"After loss, the air changes around us. It’s heavier and lighter at the same time. It’s like a veil is lifted. It seems impossible to keep going. It feels like we have to try to keep living. But we don’t. We keep breathing, and we don’t even notice it."
Throughout her memoir, Leena explains how grief isn’t temporary. It lives inside us for a long time as we carry it forever. Losing her brother felt as if part of her had been taken away.
At first, she lost the ability to talk to others, laugh with someone, or feel normal again. Even fleeing Sudan during the war was harder because she was leaving her brother buried there.
In the book, Leena addresses him in emotional verses:
"I’ve only ever carried you
I’ve only ever cradled you
And watched you grow
I never thought I’d watch you go."
As she continues to live with his loss, Leena also expresses the permanent sadness that she feels every day. She writes: "Grief does not know logic. There is no beginning, middle and end. It is all present still. That is the reality of grief. It is every day renewed."
But as time passes, Hamoodi’s death makes her rethink her existence and redefine the way she perceives it. She starts treating people with a little more love, enjoying her time with her kids, appreciating happy moments, and letting things be. She believes that even in death, clarity can change us for the better.
War, betrayal, and belonging
"This is my story of escaping a forgotten war. Mourning a forgotten country. And grieving as a forgotten mourner."
Once the war erupted in Sudan back in 2023, Leena Magdi and her family had to flee the country and head back to the US.
In her memoir, she describes what they went through during those horrifying moments: "One bomb. And then another. The walls shaking. Wondering if the next one would come through the bedroom wall, or the roof, or the living room […] We couldn’t quite see where it was coming from, but death seemed unescapable."
According to her, the war in Sudan was terribly dismissed and left without any media coverage, with an "international silence."
Both the experience of war and the loss of her brother became deeply connected to a feeling of betrayal. Losing her younger brother made her feel as if she had been betrayed by everything and everyone around her: time, homeland, and life itself.
"Betrayed by the men claiming to stand for security and freedom. Betrayed by the country he proudly and bravely stood for. My twenty-one-year-old brother was murdered, sitting in a car, by an armed national security officer dressed in plain clothing."
This sense of betrayal also leads her to question the system that allowed Hamoodi’s death to happen. Leena puts the blame on a corrupt political system for killing him: "A corrupt system allowed a trained officer to believe he could purposely shoot and kill my brother, an innocent, unarmed civilian. A corrupt system allowed him to believe whatever he did was justified."
Yet, Leena’s relationship with Sudan begins to change. Before Hamoodi’s death, she felt no sense of belonging to her homeland. Later, she begins to feel a deeper connection to Sudan and embraces the idea of having two homes and two cultures.
"This is my Sudan. The soil that held my brother. It is the land that witnessed his last steps. The air that carried his last breath."
Synchrony of life
Throughout her memoir, Leena Magdi emphasises the synchrony between good and bad. Her main belief is that peace and pain coexist in synchrony.
"I realise that I can be dressed in layers of hurt and still carry pockets of laughter. I can flow in rivers of happiness and still feel the ripples of stones. I do not have to be one or the other. Most days, I am both. That is the beauty of being, it is all encompassing."
She believes we are always living in both states, good and bad, happiness and sadness, in synchrony.
At the same time, she emphasises the beauty that exists around us. Even in bad times, beauty is always there. "In that, we see the synchrony that has always been there." She further adds: "Life and death exist in synchrony."
So, finding synchrony in life means understanding how both states carry lessons that push us forward and help us accept things as they are.
Ultimately, Leena highlights the inner strength that lets us stand firm and not let grief or any other trauma determine our future. She still grieves for her brother, but she looks ahead and sees her children and the life that awaits her.
Joyce Bou Charaa is a Lebanese freelance writer and book editor, with a keen interest in writing about literature, culture, and history
Follow her on Instagram: @joyboucharaa